


Fire

by aster_risk



Category: The Fall (TV 2013), The X-Files
Genre: F/F, Porn With Plot, Porn with Pretty Language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-28
Updated: 2018-03-30
Packaged: 2019-04-14 00:33:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,524
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14124273
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aster_risk/pseuds/aster_risk
Summary: Scully drives Stella cross the United States to meet her brother. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere, they stop to enjoy the view.Part 2: Stella meets Bill Scully





	1. Part 1

Scully sits cross-legged on the hood of her rental car, taking in the overlook, watching Stella watch the mountains. The smattering of freckles over Stella’s nose has tanned, a coffee-colored glitter of skin atop her sunburn cheekbones. Crow’s feet crinkle around her eyes as she stares, one hand shielding against the noonday glare, into the hillside. She has weathered with the burn-out stalks of lodgepoles like the top layer of a child’s collage, sticking up in the foreground but fitting neatly into the larger frame. She draws one knee to her chest, lets the other leg settle in loose slacks on the hood. Her lips curl into a wan smile.

 

“When was the last fire here?”

 

Scully shrugs. She watches Stella’s mouth form the question, the way sun and shadow hollow her cheeks like they’re carved with a spoon, how her top lip settles crookedly when she’s finished, as if she’s always poised to speak.

 

“A couple years ago, maybe” she says at last. A wind catches the trees and pulls them to one side, blackened trunks swaying precariously over the slope. There’s not a leaf to be found, not a patch of shade along the firetorn hillside, but it’s only May. The summer heat hasn’t caught up to them here.

 

“I concede that this is worth the drive,” Stella says softly, nearly drowned out by the buzz of an obnoxious engine on the road behind them.

 

Scully can’t keep the little smirk from her face. She has learned to appreciate the meandering cross country drives in her early years at the Bureau, though until now she’d never rented a car and driven from DC to California for her own pleasure. Stella, on the other hand, is not a woman Scully thought would enjoy long hours on the road, so when she broached the possibility of driving to San Jose she expected Stella to be harder to convince.

 

Trepidation of what is to come clenches her, and she purses her lips. “Don’t say it’s worth it until we reach San Jose.”

 

Stella arches an eyebrow, perhaps unconsciously. “I am not afraid of your brother.” Her tone is casual, yes, but contains an underlying danger.

 

“I don’t expect you to be. I just want you to be prepared.” She doesn’t expect Stella to hold her tongue, if Bill fails to respect either of them. Over the phone, she’d failed to disclose to Bill who exactly she was bringing to dinner with his family, only that she was seeing “a detective, from London.” Then she’d booked a hotel room, because even if Bill and Stella tolerate one another, she wants to march out of his house at the end of night and leave him to his own life.

 

A Jeep tears past them on the winding road, blaring rock music Scully recognizes from her own adolescence, and she coughs in the puff of exhaust. A dandelion she’d tucked behind her ear falls onto the car. Here, at the top of the pass, grasses and tough weeds flourish in the high altitude sunlight; towers of granite jut in every direction, snow-capped behemoths narrowing to the horizon. Every ten minutes or so, a car will pass, often lumbering RVs.

 

Stella picks up the dandelion and tucks it into the rim of her bra. Somehow, Stella’s crisp white blouse and pale slacks, the lace-lined lingerie peeking out over her buttons, are a fitting sight in the middle of nowhere. It’s the intensity in her Scully finds so alluring, the blue-grey eyes and aquiline profile lined up neatly against her handsome dress, like a black and white photograph of a high-class adventurer. An image clipped out of time—far from real depiction of mid-century explorers that somehow found its way into the collective consciousness. The glaring yellow dandelion perches between her breasts. 

 

Scully eyes it for a moment. She glances back to the empty road, their tire tracks in the gravel pull-out. There is no soft hum of approaching cars, only wind in dead trees and birdsong. Stella’s cool hand settles on her thigh, dangerously close to the waistband of her pants. Before she can pause, remind herself of where she is, she leans over and with her teeth plucks the dandelion from Stella’s shirt. She tosses it to the ground. 

 

Not a word, and Stella’s lips are on hers, fingers searching, heart pulsing. Her palms dig into the hot metal of the rental car as she sits forward and leans into the kiss. She feels Stella’s fingernails run up her back, pulling her shirt with them as she pauses for a second’s breath. She cannot break the kiss, not now, not as her t-shirt slides up to her shoulders, and she can feel herself grow wetter like someone flipped a switch within her. 

 

Stella sneaks beneath her shirt, beneath her bra. “Yes,” she whispers, as graceful hands flit against her nipples, pressed to her breasts by underwire they dare not unclasp along a public highway. Her back arches of its own accord; her lips and then her teeth graze Stella’s freckled cheek. She trails kisses down Stella’s jaw, her neck, pressed to her collarbone until she’s sure she’ll leave a mark. A little bruise will bloom, blood-born, in the hollow of Stella’s shoulder when she is finished, like a crocus bud or an abstract tattoo. 

 

Their cheeks and shoulders are clumsily intertwined. She breathes a sigh, takes a pause and takes in their surroundings. A honeybee buzzes across her line of sight. She feels Stella’s hand finally slip into her waistband, slow and careful. It is some combination of tame and thrillingly public, to feel Stella push aside her panties, fit two fingers between the legs of her pants where she sits flushed on the car.  

 

Her hand, wrapped around Stella’s neck, clenches and a tiny shudder escapes her when Stella presses up against her clit, drags across her labia inside two layers of tight clothing that already rub hot on her. It’s almost laughable, how wet she already is; she can tell she’s swollen and sensitive and all too ready. Her breath hitches, and she pushes her face into the side of Stella’s neck. Another tiny convulsion, a shiver of arousal down her spine, each time quicker and more intense than the last, each time bringing her closer to orgasm. 

 

She won’t last. She knows Stella is smirking, sees the smile lines on her face deepen in her peripheral vision. She stares at the sky, the parade of jagged ridgelines and wonders if this is a strange heaven, or perhaps a scene from a Dollar Store erotica. She, bent into the body of her lover, her chest heaving and her breasts peeking over the hem of her shirt. The sun lights her up from the back, where her t-shirt lifts and her ouroboros bares itself brashly to the road. 

 

Stella’s fingers dip into her center, then drifts back to her clit in a rhythm of slow circles that lets her build steadily. Lets her ride the roller coaster all the way to the top, freeze on the edge of the world, then come spiraling excitedly. She clenches her thighs, tries to open herself more to Stella against the seams of her trousers. 

 

Finally, finally, she picks up the pace. “Faster,” Scully moans, “like that,” her words giving way to hoarse mumbles of approval as she lets the sensation overwhelm her. “Fuck,” she murmurs, and now Stella is thrusting against her, inside her, deeper than she thinks is feasible. She teeters on the edge for just a moment before giving in. Her body bucks against Stella’s; she can feel herself clench and release and clench and release over Stella’s right hand. 

 

Her muscles are still taut as Stella starts to pull away. But then—Stella’s fingers are on her clit again, circling it harder and faster and harder and faster, and she can feel the tingling in her fingers as she climbs again. She’s pushed over the edge almost too quickly, her body rocking and her legs tightening as she climaxes again. Her shoulders tremble ever so slightly as the feeling recedes. She doesn’t lift her head immediately, still tucked away in the elegant curve of Stella’s shoulders, lips on her neck, nose pressed to the crisp collar of her blouse.

 

“Howdy!” It’s a man’s voice. An engine sound encroaches on them as a minivan pulls up beside them. A man with a handlebar mustache pokes his head out the driver’s seat. Scully starts to separate her body from Stella’s but the man doesn’t seem bothered. He’s blissfully unaware of what has transpired. In the passenger seat, Scully can make out a blonde woman in a visor. 

 

“Good afternoon,” Stella says cordially. 

 

“You two enjoying the scenery?” the woman asks.

 

“Of course,” Scully replies. “I hope you are as well.” Scully lifts an eyebrow, trying to keep the secretive smile from her face. She shifts slightly to hide her open fly, where Stella’s wrist is still in her pants. 

 

“Would you happen to know where the campground is?” asks the man.

 

Scully points in the direction they came from. “It’s a dirt road on the right. Easy to miss.” Heat is rushing to her face; she can’t tell if its exertion or embarrassment. Good lord, she’s a middle aged woman, not some teenager caught masturbating by her parents. They say with age comes wisdom, but she suspects that with age comes a casual disregard for what strangers think of her. 

 

They thank her and drive off. 

 

Stella’s hair is askew, her blouse rumpled. Scully enjoys her like this, in the post-coital disarray. It is a more accessible Stella, one that only she gets to see. Her cheeks are apple-blossom red. She smooths down her shirt, adjusts her bra. Later, she will pull over at a roadside motel, and she will leave Stella grasping at the ratty bedsheets. When she goes to bed, she will think of Bill, in his San Jose town home where he finally retired from the Navy, and of Tara and the kids. She will worry what they will say when they meet Stella Gibson, and Stella will reassure her that Bill is powerless to change her choices. She will fall asleep hoping they had a pleasant afternoon. 


	2. Part 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Stella meets Bill Scully Jr.

 

Stella pins up her hair in a slick, ornate thing. A knot of curls that reveals her widow’s peak and cuts her face a sharp figure. On anyone softer, it would be polished; on Stella it’s downright intimidating. She looks ageless and especially severe in the light of their hotel bathroom. She slides one more bobby pin into the back of her head so tightly Scully wonders if it’s pierced her skin.

 

“We both look like we’re going into work,” she observes, tucking a burgundy button-down into her slacks. She reaches up to fasten the button up to her collarbone, then stops—she’ll leave that one open tonight.

 

Stella says nothing, cocks an eyebrow. They lock eyes in the bathroom mirror, and the detective offers her a quick of her lips, a tiny smile of confidence. Stella’s freckles are on full display, and the sun has left her hair milky pale. She dabs makeup over her cheeks to cover the sunburn, fills in the distinct arch of her brow with a pencil. Intense, Scully thinks again, because it’s the only descriptor that can capture Stella consistently, day-to-day.

 

Stella’s high heels are something to behold, velvet and bottomless and so black they eat moonlight. Scully has seen these heels before, in a courtroom. She wonders if Stella has dressed herself in histories—the courtroom heels, the cocktail bar skirt, the green silk blouse she was shot in, last year, that she miraculously managed to clean the bloodstains from.

 

 

Scully snatches her car keys off the nightstand. “Are you ready?” she asks. “We told him we’d be there at six.”

 

Stella fastens the cuffs of her blouse. “Yes.”

 

Scully locks the hotel room behind them. When she turns on the car, Stella turns the radio station to classical music. Humming violins, a disembodied soul running scales on the piano faster than she can follow. She takes a deep breath, tries to slow her heartbeat, taps her thumb nervously against the wheel.

 

Stella’s hand covers her own. “Why do you visit Bill if it worries you so acutely?” It’s her moderate,  _I promise I’m not psychoanalyzing you_  voice.

 

Scully sighs. “I don’t want to lose touch with him. He and I disagree on a lot—most things, really, but he’s still my brother. He reminds me a little of my dad, and I don’t want to think that I would grow apart from my dad were he still alive, like I’ve grown apart from Bill. So I keep Bill in my life.” She shrugs a little. She turns to Stella, an errant thought popping into her head. “Do you keep in touch with family?”

 

Stella is silent, and for a moment she wonders if she’s prodding. Then Stella sighs through her nose and replies, “Not often.”

 

The air thickens noticeably. Scully wants to pry further, peel back another layer of Stella’s life—they emerge one by one like helicopter ginkgo seeds on the trees in DC, fluttering into the open. Despite her instincts, she doesn’t ask another question, instead she lets the silence speak for itself.

 

Finally— “I never got on particularly well with my mother,” Stella confesses. “There was no animosity between us, but I made a series of… polarizing decisions when I was young that alienated me from her. We make little effort to maintain a relationship. I call her on her birthday, and vice versa, and that is the extent of it.”

 

Scully wonders what happened between Stella and her family, but knows better than to ask—Stella speaks with an air of finality, and she knows the subject has been exhausted for now. If Stella wants to say more, she’ll do so on her own terms.

 

She pulls into a residential neighborhood, a suburb of skinny trees, lawns the color of emeralds and houses the color of dirt. The radio station has faded to static. She scans the mailboxes for Bill’s address, pushing her sunglasses up on her noses to shield the setting sun. The car rolls to a stop outside a pale ranch home with an American flag fluttering over the front door. Sunflowers lines the walkway, and golden dandelions run rampant in the yard. Scully thinks of the dandelion tucked between Stella’s breasts, wrinkled slightly from the midday heat as they had unraveled sex in the middle of nowhere. Three days later, and how far they are from that open sky.

 

“Let’s go.” When she gets out, she slams the car door behind her. Stella seems to rouse from a trance, climbing out the passenger seat, stilettos clicking— _tap, tap, tap_  on the asphalt. The clicking seems to get louder as they approach the front door. She recalls hearing Bill’s relief over the phone that she was bringing to San Jose anyone but Fox Mulder. She steels herself for the interaction.

 

She rings the doorbell.

 

“Oh!” Stella turns back to the car. “We forgot the wine,” and she’s clicking back down the walkway to the rental car, rummaging around the back.

 

The door swings open, and before she can call to Stella there is Tara, beaming at her. Scully is swiftly enveloped in a hug, and over Tara’s shoulder she sees teenage Matthew, his hair combed neatly back and his dress shirt tucked into his khakis. He offers her a kind half-smile identical to Bill’s. He must be at least seventeen, stiff and well-mannered and half a foot taller than his mother.

 

Finally, Tara releases her. “It’s so good to see you Dana. What has it been, six years? I heard you brought a guest of honor. Bill!” she shouts into the house. “Dana is here!” When she turns back to Scully, her eyes twinkle. “A detective, if I remember, and from London!”

 

“I am,” she says with a tilt of her chin. She doesn’t like the phrase ‘seeing someone,’ but she won’t correct it. She and Stella have a strange relationship— perhaps less strange now that she’s preparing to move her belongings to London, but strange nonetheless.

 

“Detective Superintendent,” Bill corrects, appearing next to Tara. He smiles warmly at her. “Come on in, Danes, it’s good to see you. And where is—”

 

“Fetching wine from the car,” Scully interrupts him. She doesn’t want to talk about Stella while she’s absent.

 

Grinning, Tara leans in. “Doesn’t the English accent just make you swoon?” she whispers with a sidelong wink at her husband. Scully can hear Stella’s heels click back down the walkway, and her chest tightens in spite of how few shits she rationally has left to give for Bill’s opinions.

 

Bill chuckles. “Remind me what his name is again, Dana? Detective Superintendent—”

 

“Gibson,” Stella cuts in, stepping into the doorway. She looks Bill in the eye with a stare that could shatter glass and holds out her hand. “Stella Gibson.”

 

A hush. Tara’s eyebrows shoot up. To her credit, she’s the first to breathe out, and after a couple seconds she shakes Stella’s hand enthusiastically. “Lovely to meet you!” she chirps, and eager as she may be to break the tension, there’s a genuine welcome in her voice. Thank god for Tara, Scully thinks, or else her brother’s head would have exploded years ago.

 

“Why don’t we set the table?” Scully suggests with a stony glance at Bill. She brushes past him, and Stella follows suit.

 

“Fuck,” Scully mutters, pressing her forehead into Stella’s shoulder. “we should’ve brought something stronger than Merlot.”

 

“I hardly think a round of Scotch would diffuse the situation,” Stella replies. Her voice is kind and butter smooth, a far cry from the tone in which she’d addressed Bill.

 

She feels a meaty hand on her shoulder. “Dana,” Bill presses. Stella eyes her questioningly. It’s fine, she mouths. Stella doesn’t seem convinced, but she follows Tara into the kitchen.

 

Scully narrows her eyes at her brother. “Not now. Right now let’s sit down and eat the lovely dinner Tara cooked.” They weren’t doing this before dinner. They will have a friendly goddamned evening for once; they will have a peaceful dinner if it kills her. She marches into the dining room, where Tara, Matthew, and Stella are seated. She sits down beside Stella, across from her brother.

 

Tara’s chicken casserole astonishes, and for a brief time they’re so busy engulfing the meal the tension lifts. But the table is almost too quiet, enough that Scully can hear feet shuffle beneath. She hears Stella’s stiletto tap on the leg of her chair. Stella rests a calming hand on her knee.

 

Then, through a mouthful of chicken, Matthew says matter-of-factly, “Aunt Dana, I didn’t know you were gay.”

 

Bill stiffens. It’s the word ‘gay’ that does him in, and he looks so uncomfortable that Scully almost forgets her aversion to labels and for a moment is fully prepared to slap ‘GAY’ across her forehead in rainbow letters. Instead, she informs Matthew, “I believe in loving whoever you’re with at the moment.” Her romantic life is the one facet of her existence she resists putting into a neat box; rather, her love life is strewn casually wherever she feels like putting it, day-to-day.

 

“Dessert, anyone?” Tara asks. “There’s pie in the oven; it’ll be ready in ten minutes. Until then make yourselves comfortable.

 

Matthew grins that hungry-adolescent-boy grin. “Oh, definitely.”

 

“There’s a lovely view off the back porch,” Tara tells Scully and Stella from the kitchen.

 

With a friendly half-smile, Stella gets up from the table and wanders toward the balcony. She leans over, elbows propped on the railing, flyaway hairs finally loosening her updo. To Scully’s surprise, Matthew follows her and appears to start conversation. She wonders what her nephew would have to say to Stella, but it warms her a little, to know the kid is at least friendly toward her and Stella. She gets up to join them.

 

“Dana.” Bill’s terse summons stops her. It’s an inevitable conversation; she might as well get it over with.

 

“What, Bill?” she demands, finally turning to face her brother. Her arms are crossed over her chest.

 

“You know what.”

 

“Oh, do I?” She hates this game. Bill asking her to voice his disapproval so he doesn’t have to insult her.

 

Bill rubs his temples. “Dana what are you doing? Are you and Stella—”

 

“Are we what, Bill?” Spit it out. If he’s going to judge her, he can’t talk around the point, avoiding the consequences of his words.

 

“Are you… involved?”

 

She rolls her eyes. “If you mean, ‘are we having sex,’ then the answer is unequivocally yes. Of course.”

 

His ears bloom bright pink. She can see his teeth grind, and it’s almost satisfying. Almost. “Dana, how do you think Mom and Dad would feel—”

 

She cuts him off. “Mom adores Stella for your information,” she snaps. His look of shock is worth everything. “Besides, how old am I?”

 

“Fifty,” he mutters.

 

“Damn right. I am decades beyond the age of asking my family permission to love someone. That includes Mom, and you, and it would include Dad were he still alive.”

 

Before Bill can open his mouth, Stella and Matthew are inside. Tara is serving plates of key lime pie and lighting a scented candle in the center of the dining table. One flickers before Stella, one between Scully and Bill.

 

“Thanks Mom,” says Matthew, digging in. No one else takes a bite.

 

“Will you get married?” Bill asks, and oh, she knows that tone.

 

“Not our style,” she replies.

 

He turns to Stella then. “How did you get with my sister?” It could have been a simple ‘how did you meet,’ but no, this is Bill Scully. Stella leans back nonchalantly in her chair.

 

“I was investigating sightings of unexplained glowing lights on the moor that locals attributed to fey. The owner of a manor house had been killed. The Met called Dana in as a specialist in the extraordinary. We scoured every cold case, every volume of historical murders looking for a rational explanation, found little. We only saw the fey once, beneath a full moon. Blue specks of light dusting the summer-dried grass, suspended like glitter in craft glue. You do not forget the person with whom you share such a sight.”

 

It’s not a far cry from the truth, but the truth is a corpse and a few bright lights in the sky. Never solved. Two frustrated, defeated detectives in a London bar who had wild, cathartic sex in a hotel room and exchanged numbers against the odds.

 

Bill is seething. She can see it in the bulge of his Adam’s apple, the square of his shoulders and his flexed hands on the tabletop. “Dana deserves to meet a nice man,” he growls. Oh, here comes the shitstorm. “She deserves to have a life in the real world, not some fantasy of UFOs and cryptids.”

 

The irony is, Stella’s about as likely to find a cryptid as Scully is. But Bill is fueled by pent-up emotion, and there’s no stopping him now. To her credit, Stella seems relatively unfazed. She stares Bill down, meets his raging glare; then she leans forward, to the middle of the table. Her fingers dance along the glass candleholder, flit into the candle. She takes the flame between her thumb and forefinger, hovering there just long enough to let it get hot, and pinches it. Her fingers are bone dry, Scully knows; the candlelight glows scarlet on her face for just a second. She never takes her eyes off Bill Scully.

 

When Stella retracts her hand, Scully can see soot and burns on the tender skin. A trail of smoke lifts from the candle.

 

“You should leave,” says Bill through gritted teeth, eyes fixated on his pie plate. When he looks up, he looks at his sister. “Dana, you’re right. You’ve made your choices, and there’s no going back now. Have your murders and your monsters and your sins. You’ve given everything else up anyway. You lost your chance to raise a child; you lost your chance to have a husband and a baby and a medical career and the safe, contented life you deserved.”

 

It’s the last part that does it. As if she’s simply the summation of everything she’s lost and nothing she’s gained in the process. She jams her fork into the pie and stands up so for once she’s looming over Bill and not the other way around. “Fuck you! I don’t regret a single day,” she snarls. “And as for what I deserved? I deserve more respect from my brother.”

Bill gets to his feet. “You deserve not to be gawked at for letting a woman _fuck around_ with you in your fifties.”

Before Scully can say anything, before she can spit in his face, Stella is on her feet too, looking every inch as menacing as she does in the interrogation room. “You may be Dana’s brother, but you are not mine. I see a misogynistic middle aged man who cannot seem to grasp that the women in his life do not defer to him by default. Take your sister’s advice and fuck off before she gets tired enough of your bullshit to remove you from her life for good.”

He swings at her—Scully can’t believe her eyes, but he swings at her like lightning. How the Hell had they gotten here? She winces preemptively, waiting for the impact, but it never comes. Bill's clenched fist is frozen midair. She knows Stella knew it was coming—she holds his wrist in a twisted vice, the candle burns on her thumb naked and unnerving. 

“I believe the conversation is over,” Stella says calmly. It’s the only cue Scully needs. She kicks her chair in, marches out the door in a whirlwind, before she can even process she’s left the table. She slams the car door as soon as Stella’s inside, jams the key into ignition, and dials the radio to the type of rock music she listened to as a bitter adolescent. She whips around bends driving twenty over the speed limit. The only time she looks away from the road, she sees Stella’s hand tap the cupholder, chin trembling and she recognizes the expression: barely-contained outrage.

 

Scully doesn’t hear a protest when she drives right past their hotel. She’s not ready to stop the car yet. She gets back on the highway, peels down the on-ramp at eight miles an hour. It’s a wonder they haven’t been pulled over.

 

“Get off here,” says Stella urgently. It’s the first thing Stella has said since they left Bill’s. Scully listens. They’re on one of those gas station and meandering two-lane road kind of exits, the kind where you can drive in circles for hours around the same pathetic collection of truck stops. As they wind up some shrub-lined boulevard, she spins the radio dial to the faintest white noise. The car slows; they pass a pull-out and an unceremonious pit toilet. She can still hear trucks downshift on the highway.

 

Stella says quietly, “I was engaged for a time, when I was twenty-three.” It’s that guttural tone, the hoarse drop-an-octave voice that catches Stella’s throat every time she tells a personal story. Thinking back to their conversation earlier, Stella’s estranged family, Scully already knows what story she’s going to tell. Like her dinner with Bill, she already knows how it will end.

 

“He was a nice man. That was perhaps his only memorable quality, that he was a nice man. I met him when he was an Oxford fellow, studying Anglo-Saxon literature, and I was with him perhaps eight months. We were engaged for one.

 

“My family loved him. My mother likened us to the great love stories she had read in her youth. I suspect she imagined him as the heroic Jane Austen knight that might tame her ambitious daughter. I was not enthusiastic about the engagement, but I was happy enough. It seemed rational. Then, in the span of three days, a young classmate of mine was assaulted, I was accepted into the Met, and I found out that I was pregnant. All of a sudden, I was not longer seated comfortably in the present, but staring down the barrel of a future I didn’t want.”

 

“I terminated the pregnancy and soon after, I left my once fiancee. I joined the Metropolitan Police and moved to London. I never told him about the pregnancy; it was brief, and it was never a question to be debated. When I left, it was a whirlwind, but you of all people can fathom every emotion involved. At the time, my mother begged me to have an ultrasound, and because she was my mother, I conceded. She loves to shove that old image under my nose nowadays, frame pictures of me with the man I was once engaged to marry, to remind me of the life I left behind. She thinks that I will feel an overwhelming sense of guilt. It’s a tiresome conversation, and after ten years I no longer felt like answering to her. I’ve no need to defend the woman I am now to the woman who once raised me.”

 

She can hardly fathom the honest to God fact that Stella is younger than her. Only by a couple of years, but no matter how many times she is reminded, it never ceases to amaze her. She thinks of Daniel Waterson, who she would be now, had she married and had children when she was younger, had she chosen a medical career over the FBI, forsaken the x-files. It is not a picture she can reconcile with herself, the way she is now, wiry world-weary and wound up and at fifty. She thinks of Mulder, aging like a slideshow before her. Fox Mulder. Then Stella’s, hands in her pockets, cold and inscrutable on the moor. She wonders who she would be had she not given up William for his safety.

 

Of course she thinks of William. She can’t help it. She thinks of the ultrasound she keeps in her nightstand drawer, the picture of him as a wide-eyed infant. Sometimes she feels like she and Stella swam to a shared island from opposite shores. Some people grow apart; some people grow into each other. It is not a bad thing.

 

She tries to imagine Stella Gibson in the late stages of pregnancy, the harsh lines of her face smoothed and rosy. Tries to imagine the soft, ponderous shape of her. She can’t. She has never before entertained a relationship where anyone other than her could carry a child, but she remembers clear as the moon how Mulder looked at her when she was pregnant with William, and she wonders what it would be like to look at someone and know they held in them a precious biological phenomenon you helped commence, a cosmic miracle made of nothing but love, love, love.

 

She has trouble grasping the image, for a number of reasons. Perhaps because it is Stella, and to her Stella seems unchanging, a constant around whom time molds. Perhaps because they are old and wiry and seen too much Hell to believe in unconditional miracles, or perhaps because she already sees on Stella quiet smiles, orgasms, husky oaths and bodies wrapped like vines made of nothing but love, love, love.

 

* * *

 

They drive home in pleasant silence. Scully’s hands shake so badly—even now—that Stella helps her fit the key in the hotel door. It is only when they are inside that Stella breaks the sacred quiet.

 

”Should I have left that battle between you and Bill?”

 

Scully shakes her head. “My honor feels adequately defended.”

 

”I couldn’t listen to him for another minute.”

 

”My brother is just an ass,” Scully says, and it’s like they’ve come back into the time continuum. She wipes dried tears from her eyes with her blouse as she shrugs out of it. Fuck work clothing, and fuck this underwire bra. She will be naked if she damn well pleases.

 

“Yes, he is. His family is kind, though.”

  
“Matthew seemed to like you, at least.”

 

Stella chuckles. “We had a chat. He wanted to know about standard investigative procedures. Not necessarily the paranormal.”

 

“You’re unusually good at conversing with teenagers,” says Scully. Stella has a way of getting through to people without coming across as patronizing. It was a type of honesty in how she talked.

 

“Only because I curse profusely and eat carbohydrates.”

 

Scully snorts in spite of herself. “Was that a joke?” she asks. “From you?” She can’t help it—her tears become tears of laughter. Then Stella is laughing too, an unfettered laugh like a rusty bell that’s rarely rung. She wants to put words the beauty of that noise, but stitches pinch her sides, and her lungs heave.

 

She wipes the remaining tears from her cheeks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I did not realize when I started writing how much I had to unpack emotionally with all these characters. Whoof. That was a ride to write. 
> 
> I owe the phrase "made of nothing but love, love, love" from a post by wftmulder on Tumblr about Mulder's relationship to William. It was such a lovely sentence I had to make use of it here.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm engaging with the alternate universe gods in the wake of whatever the fuck TXF series finale was.


End file.
